Category Archives: Editing

Laura Nickoll a freelance project manager and editor, specialising in non-fiction food, cookery and lifestyle illustrated titles and TV tie-ins. A member of the Guild of Food Writers, her recent contributions include restaurant reviews and chef biographies for the Where Chefs Eat series and Where to Eat Pizza (Phaidon Press). She has over 15 years’ experience in the publishing business and has worked with numerous high-profile authors and production companies, including Rachel Allen, Mary Berry, Annabel Karmel, the BBC, Neal Street Productions, and Masterchef. She launched her publishing services business in 2011, and clients include Hardie Grant, Ebury, HarperCollins, Bluebird (Macmillan), Phaidon Press, Simon & Schuster, and Orion.

Anna Steadman is Assistant Editor at Fig Tree, an imprint of Penguin Random House that publishes fiction, nonfiction and some illustrated cookery titles. Before joining Penguin, she worked at literary agency Lutyens & Rubinstein.

Chris Wold is the Associate Publisher of Nourish, the food and drink imprint of Watkins Publishing. A champion of international markets for the last 20 years, he has made a career of using licensing, co-editions and proprietary sales to find new markets for the books and authors on his lists. His latest project, The Really Quite Good British Cookbook, publishes this month, having been discovered over a chance conversation at last year’s London Book Fair.

We’re delighted to share these tips from Janice Rayment, who has been indexing for over five years. Before she started indexing, she worked in finance, and later in the horticultural industry. She creates both standalone and embedded indexes (principally in Adobe InDesign). Janice is currently Vice Chair and Finance Director for the Society of Indexers.

Do you have a friend or loved one nearing the end of their writing project? Are you yourself in the editing stages of your novel?
We’ve teamed up with some of our most experienced editors to offer you the opportunity to buy an Editorial Report this Christmas.

It’s that time of year again: time to spread goodwill and show some appreciation for your favourite colleagues, freelancers and employees. After last year’s inaugural vote, we are particularly looking forward to this year’s Unsung Heroes of Publishing campaign, where we hope to highlight a new group of exceptional publishing specialists.

This year, we’d once again like your help shining a light on publishing professionals who are particularly talented, enterprising and trusted in their respective roles, but who may not have received the broader recognition they deserve. Last year’s campaign confirmed what great stock authors put in their editors and designers. This year we want to celebrate some of publishing’s less visible – and less lionised – contributors, with a focus on the breadth of disciplines needed to make good books happen.

Whether you want to sing the praises of your production controller or recognise your recipe developer, we’re hoping for a range of submissions that reflects the diverse skillset each book represents. We’d particularly encourage you to nominate members of the freelance community, on whom so much of publishing depends but who, by the nature of what they do, often fly under the radar.

Whoever they are, if they deserve a pat on the back, send us an email below or to info@wearewhitefox.com with their name, job title, employer (if relevant) and a few sentences about what makes them praiseworthy. Let us know whether you’re happy for us to use your name and statement if your nominee gets selected, and that’s it!

The final selection will be influenced by recommendations, but also by the number of submissions received. So if you know that other people agree your nominee deserves extra recognition, ask them to submit their own recommendation, too.

We spoke to Philip Watson, Commissioning Editor for Thames & Hudson’s Museum division. Philip started working for Thames & Hudson over 20 years ago as a desk editor, with brief interludes writing and translating. Titles he has handled for T&H include The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh (in collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum), Kimonos (from the Khalili Collection), Jewelry by Suzanne Belperron, books on monsters, mythology and the occult, as well as various photography and fashion titles (Chanel: The Vocabulary of Style, Dior: New Looks, The World According to Karl). We spoke to him about passion projects, the importance of a good project manager for ambitious projects and the one illustrated book that we cannot miss this autumn.

Tom Mangold started his reporting life on the East Molesey and Ditton Gazette for 80p a week. After working as a war correspondent and investigative reporter for BBC TV news, he joined BBC TV’s Panorama where he stayed for some 28 years, making over 120 editions. He is the author of four previous books, two of which became international bestsellers. One of his books on the Vietnam War has been purchased by Hollywood and will be filmed next year. A story he wrote for The Times about a murder he and housewife Susan Galbreath investigated in Kentucky will also be filmed next year for BBC Films. His memoir Splashed! A Life From Print to Panorama was published November 8th.

We spoke to Jemima Hunt, an editor & literary agent at The Writers’ Practice. She represents authors of fiction and non-fiction, including two Sunday Times bestsellers, and has three books in development for film and television. She is a visiting tutor in creative writing at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. Spring 2017 sees the launch of a new six-week novel writing course at Oxford’s Story Museum, which she has co-founded with writer & broadcaster, Charlie Lee-Potter. More details available here http://oxfordwritingtable.com

Will technology ever become ‘learned’ enough to replace human intelligence in the publishing industry?

The English language is incredibly complex. Throughout the ages it has been enriched and challenged by thousands of writers, thinkers and speakers, and as a result it boasts one of the largest vocabularies in the world. But its advanced morphology and syntax create significant obstacles when it comes to artificially replicating the linguistic abilities of the human mind.